Still fighting Old Culture Wars About Atheism

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The backlash against the Gnu Atheists is being fought, years, even a decade after the outbreak of actual skirmishes, by pecksniffian collegiate types, who forget that there was no “public” atheism in the US above the slightest fringe before the flavor of month crashed into the public consciousness. So now a spittle cup is placed below the Cantabridgian chin, the invective machine gets loosened with a few visits to Deadclassics.com, and out comes the stupidity, from one dunce, calling “PZ Myers” psychotic,” “screeching death from a gently listing hot air” something – this kind of flapdoodle is painful to have to transcribe accurately. Village atheists are now the “village idiots,” according to the essayist for the occasionally mighty Baffler, now revealed as tone-deaf and hewing to the great, boring side of unrighteous puffery defending some variant of religious supplication.

Dawkins is greeted with the cry of “Neofascist!” This nonsense does not deserve any further fuel – The Gnu Atheists won, they have had their day, and now their personal failings, or imagined personal failings, are all that the other side can focus on. There is no need to study theology, there is no need to develop some imagined line of attack against atheism – as even this gibbering wannabe seems to concede, the Gnus went public with what the public needed to hear, and now to utter religious apologia is to be thought of as in need of psychiatric attention.

If you think that “God” or “god” might, by some weird but possible configurement of the known laws of physics, come down tomorrow from his or her or its hiding perch in the cosmos, and start to give us real, practicable advice on how to solve the wicked Problems that are imperiling the near-term survival of the human species, then you can consider yourself and “agnostic.” You never know, right?

If, however, you know that there is no way that we can expect this chimera to save our bacon, that we humans are alone on this dot without recourse to some cosmic rescue from unknown abodes, then you are, as we are all coming to be, atheist. End of story.

Give some thanks to the flawed Gnus for braving the intellectual tides of bullying and harassment from the Weiselterian snake-handlers, the science-surrounded but anti-scientismists of the tenured baffflegab proclivity, and let’s fight some news intellectual skirmishes, shall we?